Allie’s world is falling apart. She hates her school. Her brother has disappeared. She’s just been arrested. Again. And now her parents are sending her away.

I am SO glad that C.J. Daugherty changed the name of my school in her novel Night School as the secret chiefs of the world would not have been pleased to have the location where their children are educated out there for all to know.

She was a little too close to accuracy in her descriptions of the school for comfort though – the forest, the chapel, the library carrels and the dormitories were spot on. None of the staff made it in though…

Night School is a teen global conspiracy theory novel that makes Dan Brown look like a hack (well he is).

Allie is a girl with problems – kicked out of her last school for rampant acts of vandalism and frozen out of what remains of her family she is sent to posh private school Farringto um I mean Cimmeria Academy where the only things richer than the students are their parents.

Night School is that rare beast – a novel about attractive, powerful people that does not involve the supernatural! The rich girls are bitchy in a non-werewolf way and the rich boys act like over-entitled dicks because they are wealthy, over entitled and never have anyone say no to them not because they have some vampiric power.

Awesome stuff!

There are also mysterious happenings, dark warnings about not disturbing the students of the Night School and an air of secrecy and mistrust directed against Allie as she does not (according to some of the students) fit in, her face is wrong, her pedigree is unknown and someone like her is not just let in to an exclusive establishment because she is a problem child.

None of the characters are caricatures and there is no black or white morality; none of the characters are completely obnoxious or amoral and there is some character development as well as love rivalries, crazy behaviour, amazing night sports and some excellent villainous scenery chewing.

Night School is a brilliant start to a new series and I am looking forward to the next book in the series!

Neva keeps a list of the missing – people like her grandmother who have vanished. The people that everyone else pretends never existed.

In a world isolated by the Protectosphere – a dome which protects, but also imprisons – Neva and her friends dream of freedom.

But a forbidden party leads to complications. Suddenly Neva’s falling for her best friend’s boyfriend, uncovering secrets and lies that threaten to destroy her world – and learning the horrifying truth about what happens to The Missing…

In writing Dark Parties, Sara grant has combined elements of The Handmaid’s Tale, 1984 and some of the grimmest practices torn from today’s newspapers, Dark Parties is one of the darkest books I have read recently.

When he created Star Trek back in the 1960’s Gene Roddenberry used science fiction to hold a mirror up to the issues of the ‘60’s and Sara does something similar with Dark Parties.

Dark Parties is a subtly feminist novel with Neva our protagonist not a hard-core freedom fighter, but more realistically a young girl on the cusp of becoming a woman in a society where women have been reduced to almost second-class citizens fulfilling menial tasks as well as being housewives and child carriers to bolster a shrinking population.

Forget a bright future, the citizens of this society subsist on hand me downs and trading necessities with friends and neighbours, the technology where it exists has been repurposed to create a stasi-like spy network, with cameras on every corner and a population that does not know who to trust.

Brought up to believe that the world beyond the Protectosphere has been so utterly blighted and destroyed by war that their pocket of existence is all that remains, Neva and her friends know that something is wrong but they have no idea what, they just know that things must change, but they do not know how.
I found dark Parties to be a disturbing read, completely plausible and in that lay the seeds of my disquiet. I tend to moments of quiet paranoia and with the current fetishization of CCTV monitoring and tendencies to tighten up on laws especially those governing reproductive freedom I can see how such a society can develop… but I tell myself that it is paranoia and it will not happen (but that does not sound too convincing – even to me!)

Dark Parties has love, loss, betrayal, the now almost obligatory love triangle (between Neva, her best friend and best friend’s boyfriend), scenes of bleak horror that are all too real as well as redemption, reconciliation and release.

Dark Parties is thought-provoking and at times uncomfortable but is utterly compelling and eminently readable! It is dystopian science fiction at its best!

The land of the dead is a dangerous place to be…
…and so is the land of the living.

So this is one of the books I greedily grabbed (heh that rhymes) at the Orion Indigo Evening It was originally published last year through Gollancz but is being re-released as a YA novel via the Indigo imprint.

The story is narrated in the first person by Roger who has the somewhat dubious talent of being able to cross over into the Land of the Dead, but only by causing himself pain. This talent is exploited by his utter bastard of an uncle who finds the easiest way to send him over is by administering severe beatings.

So when Roger has the chance of a new life in the royal court, it seems a gift… until he falls in love with the bewitching wilful Lady Cecilia. And in this courtly world he has no idea what he is letting himself in for. With every move to win Cecilia he is drawn deeper into political intrigue and war.

Trapped ina web of secrecy, Roger is torn between his own safety and that of his friends. He can save them, but only if he can bring himself to perform a deed so unthinkable that the living and the dead shrink from it alike…

Crossing Over is an entertaining, if slightly flawed novel the concepts are brilliant but the execution was clumsy in parts. Admittedly as a teenage boy Roger would be overly concerned about his erections – but they kept popping up (slight pun intended) and ruining the flow of the story. A number of things were not explained and sometimes things just happened for the sake of the plot – Roger falling in lust love with Cecilia and following her into the forbidding land of Soulvine Moor – ok this was actually believable especially when teens and rampant hormones are involved, but Maggie mooning after Roger and following him after only meeting him a few times? I don’t know…

On the whole there were more hits than misses with Crossing Over.

I am hoping that the sequel Dark Mist Rising will elaborate on some of the concepts that were introduced in this book.

Go on pick it up – it is a good read!

I will pass it on to some of the teen fantasy fans I know to see what they think.

When a crime is committed and the police are at a loss, CRYPT is called in to figure out whether something paranormal is at work. Jud is their star agent.
Jud, unwillingly paired with new recruit Bex, has just landed his biggest case yet … people have been disappearing in mysterious circumstances while others are viciously attacked – yet there are no suspects and a complete lack of hard evidence. The only thing that links each attack is the fact that survivors all claim that the culprits were 17th century highwaymen.

This book scared me…

But then that is what you want from a horror novel. In my defence I was on the Central Line when I started reading!

The last time this happened I was about 13 and reading a book called The Fear of Samuel Walton by Roger J. Green, about a standing stone on a farm and a boy called Samuel Walton that was touched by its evil. Good book – if you can still find it!
Anyway, on to CRYPT; they are a secret branch of MI5 tasked with combatting paranormal menaces when everything else has been tried, including closing your eyes and wishing very hard that whatever it is would go away.

Following the tried and tested format of uniting loner (and bit of a loose cannon) Jud, 16 years old, he is bitter and twisted by tragic events in his past that continue to affect his present and Bex (Rebecca) fresh out of training and ready to face whatever the job throws at her. The writing is fantastic, with the players being fully formed with no two dimensional characterisation but the horror scenes are where this book really shines, the writing is visceral and actions of the antagonists brutal and bloody. Every twisted scene is meticulously described in vivid detail.
That said, this is not just a standard slasher gore-fest, this book contains history and true facts – if you pay attention you will learn as you are being traumatised. The nuggets of history and London geography form an integral part of the story and made me want to research some of the history in more detail (I will not mention it as it may spoil the enjoyment of the book).

The Gallows Curse left me wanting to read the follow up Traitor’s Revenge now!

In closing if you enjoy past-paced reads, brimming with science, action, adventure and a massive amount of horror then read this book, share it and remember do not start reading in the Underground!

I have chosen The Gallows Curse to be one of the main titles in the All Hallows Read event that I will be running in my school at the end of October.

Rosalinda Fitzroy had been asleep for 62 years when she was woken by a kiss.

Locked away in the chemically-induced slumber of a stasis tube in a forgotten sub-basement, sixteen-year-old Rose slept straight through the Dark Times that killed millions and utterly changed the world she knew. Now, her parents and her first love are long dead, and Rose – hailed upon her awakening as the long-lost heir to an interplanetary empire – is thrust alone into a future in which she is viewed as either a freak or a threat.

Desperate to put the past behind her and adapt to her new world, Rose finds herself drawn to the boy who kissed her awake, hoping that he can help her to start fresh. But when a deadly danger jeopardise her fragile new existence, Rose must face the ghosts of her past with open eyes – or be left without any future at all.

This book… just wow! I utterly adored it!

Rosalinda (Rose) is literally a girl out of time, discovered locked in a stasis chamber in a hidden room she is awakened by a kiss – so far so sleeping beauty I thought but then I was taken on a tour through a future not far removed from our own present. A world ravaged by catastrophe in the not too distant past, but still an event that lay between Rose’s past and the present (future) that she finds herself in.

A Long, Long Sleep is an epic multi-layered tale about a girl who is as much an outsider in the time she finds herself in as she was when she was in the past. At its heart, the book is about a journey of discovery and self-realisation, as well as love, loss adventure and coming to terms with abuse. I was blown away – I love science-fiction, and this book like all the best sci-fi novels I have read over the years has the science-y parts round the edges of the story just visible to the naked eye but not intruding enough to take over the tale. I found the story of Rose’s childhood as heart-breaking and compelling as her story in her future was thrilling! Her developing friendship and infatuation with the gorgeous Bren as well as meeting Otto, someone else who was as much an outsider as her was fantastically captured. The lack of a love triangle was also appreciated as these seem to have become a staple of a large number YA titles of late.

Rose may have needed rescuing in the beginning but she grows through the tale from a frightened, confused girl into a young woman with a purpose and deeper understanding of who she is and what she needs to accomplish.

Anna Sheehan knows how to drop hints and leave plot-points trailing for future novels I want to see more of this world and travel to the colonies in the solar system, learn more about the blue-skinned human/alien hybrids, hear more of the slang and just find out what happens next!

A bear has lost his hat; this story is about his journey to find his beloved chapeau. It is also a lesson about life in the wild and that nature is indeed red in tooth and claw.

Each time I read this story I hear the bear’s voice as a slow, heavy southern (as in American South) drawl.

As he travels, he comes across several creatures, and to each of these animals he asks one question:

Have you seen my hat?

They all answer in the negative

No. I haven’t seen your hat.

The frog is the same,as is the snake but the rabbit, the rabbit acts like he has something to hide.

The bear is unfailingly polite, thanking each animal as he goes along, until he collapses in despair and lies there crushed by his sense of loss until he is approached by a wise moose.

The moose speaks to him soothingly and kindles a memory of where he may have seen his hat.

No violence is shown through the entirety of the book, although it is telling that none of the animals look at him as they answer his question. Until he faces the villain of the piece, and then the cardinal rule of never making eye contact with a predator

is broken…

The ending is cunningly drawn (and written) and one is capable of drawing multiple conclusions as to what may have happened.

The illustrations are beautiful and elegant in their simplicity. The lack of background allow one to focus on the characters and the bear’s search.

It can also be read as a lovely children’s story (which it is) but I love it because it is a picture book as I imagine the Coen Brothers would have made! Jon Klassen is a talented storyteller and artist. I want my hat back is a book that can be read time and time again with no lessening of enjoyment, it is a beautiful, entertaining book!

Jack Fletcher has been left for dead…

Bruised and battered, Jack Fletcher wakes up in a roadside inn, wrapped only in a dirty kimono. He has lost everything, including his memory.

Determined to discover the truth, Jack goes n a quest to retrieve his belongings – his precious swords, his friend Akiko’s black pearl and, most important of all, his father’s prize possession.

Relying on his samurai and ninja training, Jack realises the Ring of Water is the key to his survival.

But with only a washed-up ronin – a masterless samurai – for help, what will Jack manage to find? What will he lose?

And what will he have to sacrifice?

In picking up and reading The Ring of Water I broke one of my reading rules – the one that says ‘do not start reading half-way through a series’. Okay, so not really a rule, more of a guideline. It is a good thing that I did as let me just say wow! If ever there was a book that was perfect for jumping in to a series, then Ring of Water is it!

The protagonist Jack, wakes up after a vicious beating knowing as much about his life as I did, his back story is released in flashes of memory and brief points of exposition as he tells his new companions what he can remember about his life. The Young Samurai series is set during the beginning of the Edo period in Japan, after the suppression of Christianity and the limiting of foreigners to the cities of Hirado and Nagasaki. This background makes Jack’s story all the more complicated, not to mention exciting for the reader, as he is trying to make his way to Nagasaki whilst trying to avoid the enemies he has made all the while keeping his identity as a westerner hidden.

The inclusion of snippets of Japanese belief and history maker this book all the more real for me, I loved the inclusion of the Tanuki, and the ronin being a master of Drunken Fist kung fu, actually I enjoyed the entire book but those two snippets stuck in my mind! I am a major fan of Japanese culture and history, I also enjoy a thrilling read and since reading The Ring of Water I have become a fan of Chris Bradford, and have ordered all the preceding titles in the series.

The Ring of Water was a thoroughly enjoyable read on its own but, like most books in series, enjoyment will be enhanced by reading the books that come before it. I will read the entire series and post more thoughts once that has beendone.